press start to translate Archive

I was going through some old files the other day and found some pages Tony had printed out for me. They’re from when press start to translatewas still in mid-development, and it was time for me to take photos. I thought it’d be neat to show a before/after thing:

The top sheet of paper is the in-progress layout, and the blue square with the green X is where the picture was originally going to go. You can see by comparing it to the finished book below it that page layouts almost always change when we add a photograph or some other kind of visual aid.

I’ll make a point to save more of those in-progress pages to share when we’re working on future projects!

We were secretly working on an audio play with select scenes from Funky Fantasy IV acted out by people who work at Fangamer. It was originally gonna be a free bonus emailed to people who bought press start to translate, but it was late, oops! But now it’s done!

We took a look at the alternate titles were were considering for our new book (buy it here!), now let’s look at the alternate covers we were tossing around. Here are some mockups Tony the Designer started with:

So you can see we were originally going for a glitched-out looking cover. Then Tony started experimenting with dragging the Final Fantasy IV game cartridge and box across the scanner:

And that’s how we ended up with the cover we all know and love!

Tony said this about the scanning method:

the wiggling with your hand on the scanner is really what makes the best glitches. it’s very random and by chance. It’s also a machine interrupting and trying to build an electronic image that I (a human) am purposely messing with. Conceptually it felt perfect for the Funky cover. it also looks cool haha

Quite a journey! I need to find more of this work-in-progress stuff to share. I remember we had tons of different variations of the LoL logo before deciding on the final one.

Now that press start to translate is out (buy it here!), I can share some of the alternate titles we considered. Mato wanted the title alone to make it immediately clear what the book is about, and also not explicitly reference Final Fantasy IV or Google Translate. Also, no negativity allowed. Some of the best/funniest ones were:

Copy, Paste, Translate!

The Surprising Results of a Translator that isn’t Human

Cached in Translation

This Book is About Basketball Enemas and Video Games

Everything Went Wrong! What happens when you let a computer translate a video game

Artificial Inelegance

CPU Spoony Bard

The Enema is Saying That You Should Not Wear a Basketball

Why Your Next Favorite Game Probably Won’t Be Translated By A Computer

Return the Bullshit! What happens when you let a computer translate a video game

Rated M for Machine Translation

Press Start to Translate (Nina gets the credit for saving our butts with this suggestion!)

Fangamer’s Black Friday sale started early! Out today is press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game? and a swanky new bookmark!

press start to translate is better known as the Funky Fantasy IV book. You can get it at Fangamer for $22! The Legendary Bookmark is 8 buckaroonies and you can get that one right here. Also, a special promotion just for the Black Friday sale (Nov 21 – Dec 1) : buy 2 LoL books (over $10, so excluding the passports), and you’ll get the bookmark for free!

I also wanted to share this video of Fangamer’s mailroom getting ready for the upcoming tidal wave of BF orders:

Woo woo! We’re getting closer to the printing stage for press start to translate! The book proof arrived yesterday:

And here’s a lesson in why you should always, always read your proof, even though it’s so tempting to skim it since by this point you’ve read it so many times already:

Cmd+v (or Ctrl+v on Windows) is the “paste” shortcut. Sometime during our final edits before submitting the book to the printers, we replaced the word “Gorp” with a mistyped paste shortcut. AGH! So glad I caught this.

It’s done! It’s done! After working through the weekend, we submitted the Funky Fantasy IV book on Monday! We waited until the very last second to decide on the title:

press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game?

That question mark at the end was a mistake, but we decided to keep it there. I know LoL fans were very adamant about keeping “Funky Fantasy IV” as the title, but we wanted people to be able to glance at the title and get an idea of what the book is about. We also don’t want people to assume that they have to be a Final Fantasy fan to enjoy the book.

Maybe it’ll be released soon? Haha I have no idea at this point. It’ll be this year, though. GOSH! October is almost over.

About

A lot is always going on behind the scenes of our Legends of Localization projects. Here, we’ll share some inside looks at what we’re up to and share cool photos + info of our research materials, most of which never gets seen in our main articles & books!